LawBreakers' Jump To PS4 Looks Like A Smooth Transition

When I first played LawBreakers last year, I thought it was
a fun shooter that I wasn’t certain would hook me over the long-term. I had a
chance to play the recently announced PS4 version, and came away more positive
on the experience.

I played the Blitzball mode, which is a similar mode to
Capture the Flag, but with one flag that teams must fight over. The object is
to escort the ball to the enemy spawn point into their goal. If you kill the
ball carrier, they drop the ball. It’s a simple mode, but when you combine the
two teams comprised of the various classes, it’s a fun and frantic experience.

I enjoyed the different characters I played, but I
gravitated toward the gunslinger class, which gave me two different kinds of
pistols (one revolver and one burst-fire gun), as well as a blink ability like
Tracer’s speedy maneuver in Overwatch. I liked using the right trigger to fire
my revolver for precision shots, while using the left to layer on the damage
with the burst-fire. When my character’s ultimate comes ready, both of his
pistols turn into machine guns for a short period, dealing massive damage to
anyone in my path.

While the comparisons to Overwatch are inevitable, director
Cliff Bleszinski says that there are a number of differences between his hero-based
shooter and Blizzard’s. “Overwatch is a great game,” he says. “[It] did a lot
of things to deliberately expand the market with regards to allowing a more
casual user to get in. A lot of the ultimates feel like ‘Press ‘Q’ to win.’
Ours you actually have to aim. It’s one of those things where I’m not going to
freeze the player, I’m not going to have Roadhog’s hook, I’m not going to have
Hanzo’s arrow collision. We’re very much a one-to-one ratio where what you see
is what you get. What I like to say is that this is a shooter that also has
abilities and characters, and Overwatch is a great game that has characters and
abilities that’s also then a shooter. We are very much gunning for the
Counter-Strike crowd.”

Of course, one of the selling points of LawBreakers is its
leniency with the laws of gravity. The center part of the map I played had very
little gravity, which means characters fly through the air, providing unique
gameplay moments rarely found in other shooters.

Initially, Bleszinski was concerned about how gamepads would
handle this, but he has since figured out ways to make it work. “if you play
the game on PC, it’s bats— insane,” he says. “That actually might be a bit
much for people. The console version is still pretty crazy, but it’s about 85%
as crazy. So it’s one of those things where you can only have an FPS be so
crazy with a controller.”

While I was not particularly hot on the game at first,
LawBreakers has slowly won me over more with each time I’ve played it. Bleszinski
says that this was the impression many players had due to the team taking the
game too public too early. “We wanted to be very transparent with our
development, however we found out that’s not very good for PR and press beats,”
he says. “If I could go back in time, I would have the alpha that we did not be
public because it was okay, but it wasn’t really what the full game turned out
to be. But we did learn a lot of things from it.”

Though other hero-based shooters make it so LawBreakers has
an uphill battle, I’m excited to get more time with the game when it
launches on PS4 and PC August 8.